Only in Ireland is it considered a compliment to call someone both brilliant and mad. And nobody in the IT industry personifies those traits better than Annrai O'Toole, the Irish-born CEO of Cape Clear, a provider of tools for building Web services applications that has its U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Mass.

Sun Microsystems president and COO Jonathan Schwartz went into detail about what he sees as a fundamental shift in the ecosystem of the computing industry. Like most discussions, it was long on vision and short on specifics that will turn that vision into a reality, but an overview of some of Schwartz's views is well worth considering.